Gabriel García Márquez: Before the publication of his magnum opus, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Latin America was seen as awkward, primitive, unworthy.

Photo: Stringer/colombia, Reuters

Gabriel García Márquez: Before the publication of his magnum...

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Colombian Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez listens to a speech during the New Journalism Prize awards ceremony at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MARCO) in Monterrey in this October 2, 2007 file photo. Garcia Marquez, the Colombian author whose beguiling stories of love and longing brought Latin America to life for millions of readers and put magical realism on the literary map, died on April 17, 2014. He was 87. Known affectionately to friends and fans as "Gabo", he is arguably Latin America's best-known author and his books have sold in the tens of millions. REUTERS/Tomas Bravo/Files (MEXICO - Tags: SOCIETY OBITUARY)

Photo: Tomas Bravo, Reuters

Colombian Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez listens to a...

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In this March 6, 2014 photo, Colombian Nobel Literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez greets fans and reporters outside his home on his 87th birthday in Mexico City. Garcia Marquez died Thursday April 17, 2014 at his home in Mexico City. The author's magical realist novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality. (AP Photo/Eduardo Verdugo, File)

In this 2003 photo released by the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano (FNPI), Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, left, is seen in Monterrey, Mexico. Behind is Colombian journalist Jose Salgar. Garcia Marquez died on Thursday, April 17, 2014 at his home in Mexico City. The author's magical realist novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality. The FNPI was founded by Garcia Marquez. (AP Photo/Andres Reyes, FNPI)

Photo: Andres Reyes, Associated Press

In this 2003 photo released by the Fundación Nuevo Periodismo...

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This undated file photo of Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez is seen in an unknown location. Marquez died Thursday April 17, 2014 at his home in Mexico City. Garcia Marquez's magical realist novels and short stories exposed tens of millions of readers to Latin America's passion, superstition, violence and inequality. (AP Photo/Hamilton, File)

Classics are books capable of building entire nations. Gabriel García Márquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude," which since its release in 1967 has sold more than 30 million copies, belongs to that category. Indeed, the book has done what might seem impossible: It has allowed Latin America to understand itself, to come to terms with its own potential, to embrace the forces of freedom - in politics as well as in the imagination.

García Márquez, who died April 17 at his home in Mexico City, was born in the small Colombian coastal town of Aracataca. Though poor, his family was rich in imagination. His grandfather had fought in the country's civil war, and his grandmother was an inveterate storyteller who charmed the boy night after night. When in his adolescence, Gabo - as he was affectionately known - read "The Arabian Nights," he felt it was a compendium of his grandmother's tales.

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Politics entered Gabo's life early. He witnessed economic disparity. As a law student in Bogotá, he advocated change. He also started writing for newspapers. Impoverished and homeless, he sometimes slept at a newspaper's office or in a brothel. He always cherished that crucial period as joyful.

His magnum opus was published when he was 40. At its center is the fictional Macondo, a metaphor for an entire continent. Indeed, it is possible to read in it the history of the ups and downs of Latin America from colonial times through the wars of independence, the invasive foreign capital, the communist revolutions and, ultimately, the liberal policies that invite free enterprise among its citizens.

Before "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Latin America was seen as awkward, primitive, unworthy. The narrative was written at a time when dictatorships were the system du jour, from Argentina to Brazil, from Cuba to Paraguay. Today, the region is almost uniformly represented by democratic governments, in some of which the left, once seen as a threat, has risen to power through elections. The novel, paraphrasing "Hamlet," put a mirror up to nature: It set a population of over 450 million free, at least at the level of the imagination. Liberalism is now its sine qua non.

Of course, Gabo also wrote "Love in the Time of Cholera," about his parents' love in old age, as well as gems like "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," a detective novel in reverse, where the victim is the only one who doesn't know he will die.

He was the leader of the so-called Boom, a literary movement known for its magical realism, a term he himself didn't like. Those writers were infatuated with the Cuban Revolution of 1958-59. But while some of his colleagues, from Carlos Fuentes to Mario Vargas Llosa (with whom he had a lifelong feud), slowly distanced themselves from Havana, and in particular Fidel Castro, at the ideological level Gabo became recalcitrant, remaining loyal to the Cuban leader. Scores of followers in Latin America saw a contradiction between his backward politics and his push to free the imagination in search of a more democratic and even pluralistic future.

That is beside the point. His literature is what matters. "One Hundred Years of Solitude" has been called the Bible of the Hispanic world. Fittingly, its working title was "La casa" - the house. The entire plot unfolds in the domestic space where a family, the Buendías, rapidly multiplies. Almost all the men have one of two names: José Arcadio and Aureliano. All the José Arcadios have the same character and maybe the same fate, and likewise the Aurelianos.

I have heard countless readers complain that the repetition of names is mind-boggling. But people in Latin America are proud to be called just as their ancestors, precisely because they are a new incarnation of them. This is a communal civilization, one where individualism is looked down upon.

It is strange to think of perfection as attainable in art. Yet Gabo's narrative is as close to it as it gets. Its mere existence justifies the Spanish language. The other classic of Hispanic civilization, "Don Quixote of La Mancha," is unwieldy in comparison. I sometimes think that if I took the first copy I ever read - in Mexico, when I was 17 - and threw it up in the air, the words would fall back down patiently, like treasure, right back where they belonged. For having reread the 20 symmetrical chapters at least 20 times, I can say, without a doubt, that there is not an extra comma in them. Everything is where it should be.

The author inserted all sorts of jokes for us to uncover. At one point, for instance, Gabo himself befriends one of the Buendías. In another, characters from novels by other Latin American writers, like Alejo Carpentier, Fuentes and Julio Cortázar, get mixed in with the cast. There is a famous passage in which a thread of blood emerges from one of the character's bodies and finds his mother by navigating almost the entire town of Macondo without anyone stopping it - only to return back to its source with the mother following it.

In accordance with his will, Gabo was cremated in Mexico. His ashes will be divided between Mexico and Colombia. Undoubtedly, with Gabo's death we enter a period of Gabolatría, turning him into a totem. There are drawbacks to it. But he more than merits the accolades. If Latin America were to be destroyed tomorrow, one would be able to rebuild it through Gabo's novel. It stands alongside "The Odyssey," "The Divine Comedy" and Shakespeare's best plays as the DNA that makes us human. And, like them, it will be reinterpreted for generations.

Ilan Stavans is the Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino culture at Amherst College. His latest book is "Pablo Neruda: All the Odes" (FSG). "A Most Imperfect Union: A Contrarian History of the United States" (Basic) will be released in July. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com